Oxidation cannot take place without oxygen. It is the task of the respiratory organs to deliver oxygen. In man this function is performed by the lungs. However, one should not restrict the term ‘respiration’ to those rhythmic movements of the chest which result in air being drawn into and forced out of the lungs. This is not respiration proper, but merely transportation of the oxygen necessary for it.

Respiration consists essentially of oxidation processes, which are only slightly reminiscent of combustion and can by no means be identified with it. During ordinary combustion oxygen combines directly with the substance being oxidized. But during the biological oxidation of proteins, fats or carbohydrates hydrogen is extracted from them. This hydrogen then, in its turn, reduces oxygen and forms water. Remember this scheme of tissue respiration because we shall return to it later.

Oxidation is a most important means of obtaining energy. This is why astronomers studying the planets of the solar system are anxious to know whether they have oxygen and water since life may be expected where they are present. It is quite understandable why the good news of the world’s first soft landing by the Soviet interplanetary station Venus 4 on the planet Venus was overshadowed by the report that its atmosphere contains hardly any free oxygen and very Httk water, while the temperature is as high as 300°C.

But one should not be too pessimistic about this. Even if there are no traces of life on Venus, that planet is still not without hope. It may be possible to populate its upper atmosphere, where it is not so hot, with primitive unicellular plants which would consume carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. The very dense atmosphere of Venus will make it possible for tiny unicellular living organisms to float in it without dropping onto the planet’s surface. Such organisms would ultimately change the gas composition of the atmosphere on Venus.

This is quite a feasible task for green plants. The atmosphere of the Earth, in the form we know it now, was created by living organisms. Each year the plants on the Earth consume 650 thousand million tons of carbon dioxide and produce 350 thousand million tons of oxygen. There was a time when the Earth’s atmosphere also contained much less oxygen and much more carbon dioxide than it does now. It is only a question of time. Several hundred million years will probably be sufficient for radical changes to occur in the atmosphere of Venus. There are grounds for supposing that by that time the temperature on the planet will have dropped considerably (wasn’t it once hot on the Earth too?). When this happens, Earthmen will be quite at home there.

The concept of mechanism is going out of style today, largely because of a misinterpretation of the Heisenberg principle of indeterminism. There’s a mechanistic interpretation of the universe and scientists often subscribe to it for at least two reasons: in the first place, because it is heuristic. Second, because a mechanistic theory which is thoroughgoing and not oversimplified is compatible with many of the phenomena which transcend mechanism.

Perhaps it might be well if we elaborated on this. We all have some model in the back of our minds of the machinery of human behavior. Let me be bold enough to present my particular model, recognizing that it is naive and oversimplified, because it may form a basis of discussion. In many ways, this model of human behavior has a great deal in common with the Bostonian’s map of the United States. It overemphasizes those areas with which I am familiar and underemphasizes others. This mechanism may be likened to a steam engine which is energized by a fire consisting of the oxidation of glucose, glucose and oxygen going into the brain by way of the cerebral circulation and reacting there. Other substances represent in mass a very small quantity of material; nevertheless, they may be extremely important in the regulation of the flame and in the continued development and repair of the whole machine.

The flame heats a boiler and turns a flywheel. This we may call the Krebs cycle. Energy from this flywheel passes through a clutch mechanism, which can be regulated to increase or decrease the efficiency of transmission of energy from this flywheel to another one. This clutch is the mechanism of phosphorylation, or the creation of high-energy phosphate molecules from the energy released by oxidation.

We may now put into the system a dynamo, generating electrical energy. This energy becomes stored in a battery, which represents the piling up of certain chemical constituents of the cell which are high in energy content, the so-called energy-rich phosphorus compounds. From this storehouse there is a more or less continuous How of electrical energy to the thinking or integrating functions of the brain, which can be naively represented by a series of electronic tubes, hooked together in such a way as to constitute a magnificent electronic computer.

Someone has said that paranoid schizophrenics and scientists have one thing in common in their behavior: their preoccupations change with the development of technology. Several centuries ago the brain was a hydraulic engine, then it became a telegraphic machine, then it became a telephone switchboard, and now it is an electronic computer.

Going into this computing machine are a number of input leads from the ear, which can be designated as a microphone; from the eye a photo cell; from all the senses, but these two will be sufficient.

There is another device which selectively stores the events which take place in the rest of the machine, some tape recorder or other more sophisticated gadget. It is called memory. Within this machine, then, is the entire universe of its experience, past and present.

Finally, the output of that machine, integrated in all its parts, results in behavior, which is largely a function of muscular activity.

This, admittedly naive, representation of the mechanism of behavior nevertheless embraces cerebral metabolism, and also biophysics, neuroanatomy, the social sciences, psychology, cybernetics, and so on.

Even if I had the supreme gift of a great biographer, my message would not be quite the one demanded on an occasion like this, in which laws of personality formation and functioning are, I believe, sought conjointly by the various sciences of man. I believe that when the story is all told the nomothetic effort will give not a small, but a large place in personality study to the researches into history, literature, and the arts, and also a deeper intuitive grasp of what it is that Euripides, Dante, Shakespeare, and Walt Whitman had to say about their own experience as they lived through it, or as they put it in eternal form through the mouths of their characters.

The scientific effort to study personality has proved to be extraordinarily difficult. It is a labor fraught with conflict, frustration, the discovery of one’s limitations and mistakes, the endless necessity for backtracking and doing over, and the certainty that one will not only fail one’s contemporaries, but fail oneself in the process. Of course, anyone who talks about personality is going to fail. But Boswell, while he failed, made for himself a glorious place as a father of biography. William James (H. James 1920), as we learn from his letters, could discover the richness of human interchanges in a manner which he knew he could never write into a systematic psychology. During the last few centuries, many men of wisdom, like Im-manuel Kant and William James, have met the effort towards a scientific psychology with utter incredulity. “A nasty little science,” said James. Such men are sure that the world of abstractions, laws, and principles applies only to inert matter, or at best to those aspects of “matter in the living state” which are closest to physics and chemistry; and of all the searching words of scepticism or hostility they have directed to the efforts to make a science of psychology, they have been most profoundly and earnestly hostile to the attempt at a science of personality. Those of us who believe that such a science can be coaxed into existence and given a dignity and even a meaning worthy of a philosopher are out of step with contemporary science in many ways.

The trouble lies partly in the fact that personality is far more complex than most of the phenomena of the life sciences; another lies in the fact that there are profound cultural biases in each period which cause person-ality to be looked upon in a way plainly reeking with all the difficulties of the sociology of knowledge and cultural relativity; and third, plainly and patently, that the conscious and unconscious dynamics of the individual investigator of personality wreak havoc with his most devoted and rnost disciplined scientific efforts. All of the pitfalls which the various kinds of relativity have pointed out, the fact that—as Einstein says—there is no “privileged position,” the fact—as Freud made clear—that one cannot outgrow one’s own deeply ingrained personal outlook when one looks upon either persons in general, or the theory of the person in particular—all this makes the challenge peculiarly severe. There are culturally ingrained and personally colored considerations which determine what can and what cannot be done with the concept of personality, and if we know that our theory is sound, we know that its very soundness inexorably rules out the possibility of our achieving the objectivity which we seek.

No less obvious, however, is the fact that the challenge must be accepted. We live in an era in which we are learning a great deal about the facts that belong to the physical sciences, while we still know tragically little about the facts that have to do with human psychology, and least of all about the facts that have to do with the individuality from which growth, creativity, and leadership must spring. Mallory said that he climbed Everest because it was there. The psychologist must study personality first of all “because it is there.”

What about hard experimental data? Conceptually, one way to resolve whether fever is adaptive would be to infect a group of mammals with some harmful bacteria or virus and then allow one half to develop a normal fever and prevent the other half from raising their body temperatures. The survival of the two populations of mammals would be compared and if fever were harmful, then the group which was prevented from elevating its body temperature would have a greater survival rate. If fever were beneficial, then the opposite results would be obtained. The problem with this experiment is that it is very difficult to attentuate the fever in an infected group of mammals without making the results difficult to interprete. In the process of preventing the fever, one must administer antipyretic drugs or perform some other manipulation which would confound the results. For example, would the differences in the survival rate of the two populations be attributable to the effects of the drugs on body temperature or to some side effect not related to their antipyretic properties? There have, nevertheless, been many experiments, using mammals, which have attempted to resolve whether fever is adaptive or maladaptive, and while the results of these studies are difficult to interpret, they tend to indicate that in many cases fever is beneficial to the infected host.

Another approach to determining the function of fever has been to find a more appropriate animal to use in one’s investigations. This really becomes a question of selecting the best animal to use to answer a specific question. For example, if one is interested in the effects of some drug on the cardiovascular system, then one often uses the dog or the laboratory rabbit as the experimental animal. One advantage is that they are large and, therefore, relatively easy to work with. Another and perhaps more important advantage is that since their cardiovascular system is similar to that of human beings, the results obtained using these animals can often be extrapolated to other vertebrates, including man. Neurobiology is another area in which the proper selection of an experimental animal has produced important results. When one is interested in some aspect of nerve cell function, cells from invertebrates, such as the squid, are often used. These cells are often selected because they are large and easily accessible. Furthermore, since the physiology of nerve cells tends to be relatively conservative from one group of animals to another, the results obtained using the nerve cells of most invertebrates can be extrapolated to basic nerve processes in other groups of organisms. The scientific literature is literally filled with the fruitful results obtained by investigators who carefully selected the most appropriate animal species for their investigations.

It seemed to us that one way to resolve the question of the role of fever in disease would be to use an ectothermic organism as the experimental animal. An ectotherm (in contrast to an endotherm) is an organism which regulates its body temperature largely by behavioral processes. Reptiles, amphibians, and fishes are examples of ectothermic vertebrates. If these organisms developed fevers in response to infection, then one would have an excellent experimental animal to use to investigate fever’s function. Such an animal could be infected with live pathogenic organisms, and because its body temperature could be easily controlled by the experimenter, it would be possible to investigate the effects of holding the animal at febrile and afebrile body temperatures.

First, we had to determine whether ectotherms developed fevers in response to infection. If they did, this by itself would provide indirect evidence that fever was beneficial, for why else would fever be found in vertebrates from fishes through mammals? As a result, a series of experiments was initiated to trace the evolution of fever. Much of this book is a summary of these investigations, by members of my laboratory and others, to trace the evolution and to investigate the adaptive value of fever.